Hey Hey Hey, It's the 4th of July

So, besides listening to songs titled after this day by X, Dave Alvin (well, the same song as the X one, in very different versions) and The Beach Boys, what else is there to do?

Well, I plan to spend most of it here indoors at home writing sections of my two plays that open in August.

One, Everything Must Go (Invisible Republic #2) is a follow up to Invisible Republic #1: That's What We're Here For (an american pageant), which was a look at how things may have not quite gone the way they should in the USA post-WWII, done as a trade-show patriotic revue. This new one is a dance-movement-speech-piece detailing a day in the life of an advertising agency, ultimately about selling and a country where everything has a price and the intrinsic value of anything is only equal to its market price.

The other show, Spell, is a cheery piece about a woman who regards herself an American patriot and has committed a terrible, murderous crime in, as she sees it, an act of revolution against a USA government that has become illegal and un-Constitutional and must be overthrown - she'd prefer a new Constitutional Convention, but feels that's even less likely than armed revolution.

So, appropriate work for this gloomy patriotic day, with the thunderheads coming in.

As should be noted and read this day, here are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.

Sheila O'Malley over at The Sheila Variations is always good for posts on American History, and I'm sure she'll have more today - she's already posted yesterday on John Adams' letter to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, and today on July 4, 1826 (the day on which John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died).

In non-patriotic but glorious news for film buffs, a NEARLY-complete print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been FOUND! Over a quarter of the original cut of the film has been assumed lost forever for years, and now about 85% of that quarter has appeared in a newly discovered print.

The story is at GreenCine Daily.

In any case, no new cat pictures today, unfortunately, but along with the Friday Random Ten, I'll do another music-geek meme that appeared in a couple of blogs I read today:

Post a List of Your Favorite Albums of Every Year from the Year You Were Born to the Present.

Never thought of this list before, and I'm as list crazy as most music geeks (see: High Fidelity), so here's 40 years of the albums I prefer, behind a cut, because that's a long-enough list to want to hide (and I'm sure more than a few of you won't give a damn anyway). I list some runners-up as well, because it was nearly impossible to choose in some years - and there are plenty of top albums for me that aren't here, the "runners-up" are just for time when I really had to sit and choose between albums for the top spot. I also chose to limit this to "pop music" albums, so as not to wind up having to decide if I wanted to throw Einstein on the Beach or various albums by The Firesign Theatre into my mental competition.

( 40+ Albums of Some Quality )

Damn. If I'd have known how long making that list was going to take, I wouldn't have bothered starting . . . that took forEVER!

And back in the iPod, here's a Random 10 out of 26,130 tracks:

1. "Down In The Valley" - Johnny Cash - Legend
2. "Garner State Park Concert Spot - Houston TX" - radio promo, late '60s
3. "Big Business" - David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel
4. "This Land Is Your Land" - Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper - Root Hog or Die!
5. "Gonna Leave You Baby" - Sammy Lewis/Willie Johnson Combo - Sun Records: The Blues Years 1950-1958 vol. 8
6. "Next In Line" - Johnny Cash - From the Vaults vol. 2
7. "You Can't Take It Away" - Tawney Reed - Backcombing
8. "New Special Squad" - Guido & Maruizio De Angelis - Beretta 70—Roaring Themes from Thrilling Italian Police Films
9. "Vacation in the Mountains" - The Cleftones - For Sentimental Reasons
10. "Girl in Tears" - Phluph - Phluph

Have a good 4th, friends . . . I'm now off, as always on this day, to watch 1776 again . . .

More Patriotism On Yo Ass

So, Berit and I just watched Terrence Malick's The New World and Peter H. Hunt's 1776 (as I continued writing Everything Must Go.

Next on the pile of today's filmic salute to the USA, P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which we haven't seen yet.

We won't have time to get through the whole pile of films I wanted to, but also in there, continuing the chronological order of things, are Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff and Michael Sarne's Myra Breckinridge.

"Only a country as mad as ours could be such a ROUSING success!" - Wardley Meeks in Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance.

And in the cut here, two video salutes for the day - a repost of the classic song/animation about the Father of Our Country, and a more recent tribute from The Muppets . . .

( Stars and Stripes Forever )

Have a good weekend, folks . . .